Computers shouldn’t be unusable. You don’t need to know how to work a telephone switch to make a phone call, or how to use the Hoover Dam to take a shower, or how to work a nuclear-power plant to turn on the lights. — Scott McNealy (via Usernomics)

Contrary to popular belief, one of the biggest challenges we face when developing an application isn’t deciding what features to put in. It’s what features not to put in.

At least once a month, we get some of our users together to play with the latest prototypes we’ve created. But guess what? Few of those actually make it out of the lab. And that’s a good thing, if we put every feature in, you’d need a user manual bigger than the phone book just to get started!

So why do we hold back on all those funky features? As Kathy Sierra puts it, we want to make sure you can kick ass without having to spend too long below the Suck Threshold. In other words, keeping it simple means you can have a fun, enjoyable experience right away.

Even if we liked complicated, whizzy things with lots and lots of buttons, it just wouldn’t make sense to attempt it on mobile. We want fast, easy-to-digest content when we’re on the move, right?

With this in mind, we still want to add the features you’re most interested in. Is it the ability to post your search results to Jaiku or to send them by SMS? What would make your experience more fun? We’re always listening and we will put the best ideas in place.

If you want to make a suggestion, you can…

• leave a comment right here on the blog
• pop your ideas in the feedback form (you’ll need to register first)
• or drop me an email at vero@taptu.com

What would the mobile search engine of YOUR dreams do? (Other than telepathically order the right flavour of ice cream just when you want it, of course. We’re working on that one.)

Having been in Austin, Texas for a few days now, I’ve witnessed one of the greatest social gathering of tech-minded people to ever happen, once a year at South by SouthWest Interactive.

The killer app this year is undeniably… the same as last year. It’s Twitter through and through. In the context of a conference where thousands of people are milling around between panels, looking for each other and the Next Big Thing, Twitter is the killer app. It’s assumed and expected amongst all attendees that, just as we have a little heart pumping on the inside of our ribcage, we all have a Twitter username.

However, the observation that I found most interesting is the energy everyone put into communicating what they were hearing. The Zuckerberg keynote got the room buzzing and, in no time, even bloggers who were nowhere near the event were getting the echos of a poorly led interview. In previous years, it would have at least taken a few hours until someone did a write-up of the keynote, but with these social devices and the perfect system to communicate short snippets of information, it was broadcasted as soon as the sentiment arose amongst the crowd.

I’m at risk of pointing out the very obvious here but the Blackberry - probably the most common phone here at SXSW - is mindblowingly business-focussed. Even the font is dry, harsh and doesn’t make the faintest attempt at being visually pleasing. It is a stark, utilitarian device in contrast to the iPhone’s soft, rounded curves and swish user interface - the other baby of the conference. While each device has its pros and cons - attempts at typing while walking on an iPhone very much results in an epic failure - it’s fascinating that this geekfest brings together the two polar opposites, the functional and the creative, in one place as the two most used devices.

What they have in common is that they bring people together socially. From Ballroom A to the depths of Room 19-B, and from Austin to the rest of the world, they make communication easy. Comforting to know that even geeks need to be social too, no?

Twitter is, at its core, an amazingly simple tool. We really like simplicity and were drawn to it quite some time ago now. Its simplicity also makes it quite powerful, as we witnessed early this morning when the UK earthquakes were first reported via Twitter. It’s also just a hugely mashup-friendly environment, as proven by the smarty-pants at Botanicalls who gave their houseplant a way to call out for help (and water) by twittering. Awesome!

Howard Rheingold from Smartmobs was waxing lyrical about Twitter a few days ago, which got me thinking about why I’m such a fan of it, having posted on average 3.46 tweets a day since December 23rd 2006, when I first joined. (Phew, putting it in those terms, I’m more addicted to Twitter than I am to coffee. Oh dear!)

Howard cites openness, immediacy, variety of content and free-form reciprocity as some of the reasons for his Twitter fandom, all of which I agree with. I really love the quirky morning comments, the whispers surrounding the Apple Store being closed before the next Mac update or the unplanned get togethers over coffee after reading a friend tweeting from down the road.

As a result, a few weeks ago, we launched a new sharing feature on Taptu that allows you to broadcast your search results to your Twitter feed. It’s really easy to setup and it’s a single click to share an item once you’re logged in. Amongst others, Mike Rowehl sounds excited about sharing to Twitter, but as you can see, we’re still polishing things a little, so if you try it out, drop us a line and let us know what you think.

On Wednesday, I mentioned that we launched our music game, which tests your music knowledge of the past three decades.

To further spread the fun, we’ve created a Facebook version of The Music Cube, which you can install and play directly within your profile.

Go on, it’s Friday afternoon, have a play you skivvies!

Yesterday, the team thought the bottles of bubbly were to celebrate 100,000 users for our Music Wall Facebook application…

But little did they know, we were only just beginning our own Ballmer Peak experiment…

Original xkcd cartoon: http://xkcd.com/323/

Yesterday, our Music Wall application on Facebook hit a new milestone - There are now over 100,000 people currently using the app.

When the idea cropped up that we should use our search engine to create a music app on Facebook, we didn’t know whether it would really fly since there are so many apps out there. It’s exciting to see how users quickly adopted us and started sharing music with their friends, allowing us to hit that milestone. So this is a big thank you to all our users for making this such a fun project!

Go on, what are you listening to these days? Why not share it?